


the things that grow in hospitals

by silkwyrm



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hospitals, mold, very loosely based on hanahaki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 14:36:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8671342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkwyrm/pseuds/silkwyrm
Summary: Eichi is eight, and he’s already been in hospitals for so long,





	

**Author's Note:**

> hanahaki disease is something growing in someone's lungs because of strong feelings
> 
> eichi seems like the type to have it be something less elegant than flowers 
> 
> also this is old and sucks in like 3 different ways i apologize

Eichi is eight, and he’s been in hospitals for so long, he’s started to get familiar with the color white, with the sterility of alcohol-- with the way mold grows, in small dark splotches, in areas where people don’t clean, don’t look--  
He remembers the smell of it just as intensely as the sharp piercing smell of alcohol wipes, the way it lingers around him right before a shot.

Mold smells different, though. Mold smells musty, like it’s choking him--like it’s planting its spores in his lungs, like he should run out into the clear air, breathe in something fresh--move, before it grows.  
Don’t stay in the places where people don’t clean, don’t stay out of sight or it’ll grow on you, in you, too--  
(he can’t run, though, and no one will notice, no one will help)

Years pass, and eventually he leaves the hospital. Eventually he can go out into the air. Eventually he can be somewhere else.  
(but he can still smell the mold, sometimes, can still feel it under his skin, like a reminder of hospital closets and cold tile floors)

Eichi is twelve, and he’s gotten worse.  
He’s always been sickly, always been tired, but he’s never been stupid.  
He knows the way people look at him, like touching him would make them sick too, like touching him would do what the sickness did to him, to them  
He wants it to. He wants to spread it to other people, to make them know what he feels, to make them stop looking at him like that--  
He wants---(he doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t know anything except that he wants /something/ to change, wants it so badly he hurts--)  
(and he swears, with that want--he can feel growth along the inner lining of his lungs, small delicate hyphae tipped in dots of color growing outwards, growing over the membranes and arteries and veins and swaying slightly, with his breath)  
(he coughs, and the slightest black dusting of spores covers his palm)  
He has yet to learn what true want is.

When he is fifteen, he finally understands- the desire to make something completely and wholly yours, to crush all your enemies, to change the world to be his rather than to let it just pass him by.  
(the desire to see the sky just once, at the end of your life, to spread your spores far and wide, to leave a mark on the world, instead of just dying in the corner of a room)  
He’s spent so long wanting to feel the air, he’s spent so long wanting. He can feel how thick the filaments in his lungs have gotten, how hard it’s gotten to breathe.  
(they’ve grown under his skin now, into the soft fat of his stomach, growing underneath the skin of his neck like roots)  
He wonders when they’ll break out, when he won’t be able to hide the truth about himself anymore.  
He wonders if they’ll hide when they see the tips of the stalks break out from under his skin, grow upwards and spread into the air, too late to stop and too late to remove--  
(maybe it’ll be for the better, he thinks. but afterwards. after he’s won, they can do what they like with him)

Eichi is seventeen, and he’s been defeated, but somehow he’s still around.  
With everything he’s done, there are still people who love him.  
(and he, himself, is surprised when they say he hasn’t taken away their dreams, hasn’t spoiled their lives, hasn’t spoiled them)  
(he has spoiled many things, just like he’d wanted to do when he was younger out of spite)  
And so, hearing them say that is strange.  
He wonders if they haven’t seen the spores, the way they’re growing around him, through him, bursting through his skin and changing him, wonders if they just think they can just cut the bad parts from him, cut the filaments from under his skin and leave only healthy tissue behind to heal.  
He knows, though, if they were to cut him open, really cut him open from tip to toe, they would find that the fungus itself was so intertwined with him that there was no way to remove it.  
(curling through his lungs, leaving a dusting of fuzz over his heart, covering everything with their spores)  
(even if they were to keep cutting, they would find no healthy tissue, nothing kind and living and pink like organs should be underneath all the rot)  
(the mold is as much a part of him as any other organ, and he half-regrets it)

Eichi Tenshouin has never been a man to regret his desires, but there are people he wants to keep clean, as much as possible.  
He wants to sat that they would be right for leaving him, he desperately wants for them to not be the same as he is, and yet, when they say that they love him, want to stay with him despite everything he’s ever done, a small part of him hopes.  
He hopes that he can stay with them, until his body goes still, until the mold consumes it, hopes that in that staying, no part of those spores transfer to them, hopes that, perhaps, in the end they will still say they love him.  
(because the truth is that eichi tenshouin is familiar with desire but unfamiliar with love)


End file.
